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Theodore Dalrymple on HG Wells's 'The Time Machine'

  • Past Event
  • Dates
  • Past Event
    March 17th at 1pm ET | 10am PT | 5pm GMT
  • Location
  • Zoom Webinar

This event took place on March 17th, 2022. The podcast version is available here.

 

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a pioneering author of science fiction classics such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). A brilliant seer and prophet with a very pessimistic view of humanity, Wells was, nevertheless, a naive and shallow political thinker. The two sides of his mind—the artistic and the ideological; the “unofficial” and the “official”—were in conflict. It is the pessimistic artist, rather than the socialist, eugenicist, and futurist, that we remember today.

Join us for a lecture by Theodore Dalrymple (the nom de plume of Anthony Daniels) on Wells's extraordinary "scientific romance," The Time Machine. Although Wells was an ardent believer in social progress, the future that he envisions in what is arguably his most famous novel is hardly a progressive fantasy. Instead, he conjures a dark, dystopian world, one which is in tension with his own political, evolutionary, and collectivist commitments. An artist whose creativity and insight were untrammeled by his personal politics, Wells offers an instructive example of a literary genius divided between his views and his muse, his own personal perspective and his enduring, inspired vision. This tension—between what someone feels he ought to think and what he actually does think—is one many of us face today.

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